Gingrich Gave Push to Clients, Not Just Ideas

Newt Gingrich is adamant that he is not a lobbyist, but rather a visionary who traffics in ideas, not influence. But in the eight years since he started his health care consultancy, he has made millions of dollars while helping companies promote their services and gain access to state and federal officials.

In a variety of instances, documents and interviews show, Mr. Gingrich arranged meetings between executives and officials, and salted his presentations to lawmakers with pitches for his clients, who pay as much as $200,000 a year to belong to his Center for Health Transformation.

When the center sponsored a “health transformation summit” at the Florida State Capitol in March 2006, lawmakers who attended Mr. Gingrich’s keynote speech inside the House chamber received a booklet promoting not just ideas but also the specific services of two dozen of his clients. Executives from some of those companies sat on panels for discussions that lawmakers were encouraged to attend after Mr. Gingrich’s address.

Gerard White, president of Clearwave, which paid about $50,000 to become a center member, used the occasion to pitch his company’s system for managing patient medical data. “It was a way for companies who were part of Newt’s group to say to health officials in Florida, ‘Hey, here are some exciting things we’re doing,’ ” Mr. White said.

Mr. Gingrich and his aides have repeatedly emphasized that he is not a registered lobbyist, an important distinction in their effort to position him as an outsider who will transform the ways of Washington. They say that he has never taken a position for money and that corporations have signed on with him because of the strength of his ideas.

“You have somebody who knows what he believes in, he can effectively communicate it, and he’s successful in doing it,” said his spokesman, R. C. Hammond. “God bless America.”

Yet if Mr. Gingrich has managed to steer clear of legal tripwires, a review of his activities shows how he put his influence to work on behalf of clients with a considerable stake in government policy. Even if he does not appear to have been negotiating legislative language, he and his staff did many of the same things that registered lobbyists do.

The center’s own records — kept in a restricted section of its Web site, but found by The New York Times in an unsecured archived version of the site — contain several previously unreported examples.

Two years before the Florida “summit,” Mr. Gingrich made a presentation to Republican lawmakers in Georgia, promoting the work of his member companies by citing specific benefits if they were hired. For example: “VitalSpring could save the State Employee Program over $20 million a year.”

Minutes of a members-only conference call from March 2004 said the center had “arranged joint meetings” for members to present their work on electronic health records to top federal officials, noting that Mr. Gingrich “reported very positive feedback overall from these meetings.”

He also pressed for passage of a federal bill to increase the use of electronic health records, collaborating with one of its co-sponsors, Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, both Democrats. After appearing at a press briefing on the issue with Mrs. Clinton in 2005, he stated flatly on Fox News: “We’re launching a bill.”

Mr. Gingrich’s ability to reach leaders like Mrs. Clinton was a selling point for the center. A PowerPoint presentation for prospective members advertised its “contacts at the highest levels” of federal and state government. Paying $200,000 a year for the top-tier membership, it said, “increases your channels of input to decision makers” and grants “access to top transformational leadership across industry and government.”

In asserting that Mr. Gingrich has never engaged in lobbying, his aides say lawyers have thoroughly vetted all of his activities. Randy Evans, a Georgia lawyer who has represented Mr. Gingrich since his days as House speaker, said none of Mr. Gingrich’s clients paid him to adopt a position that he did not already have.

“That matters a lot,” Mr. Evans said, “because there was never a point where we identified a client’s position first and decided, ‘O.K., that’s where we’re going.’ His vision always came first.”

Photo

Credit
Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Mr. Evans said that when Mr. Gingrich appeared to be promoting the services of his clients before state lawmakers, he was merely citing examples to buttress his ideas, and that the companies “weren’t paying him to do that.” Mr. Gingrich would also include examples from firms that were not center members, he said.

Any interactions Mr. Gingrich had with members of Congress or federal officials on matters important to his clients “followed specific protocols and procedures” that the center designed to ensure he stayed within the law, Mr. Evans said.

“It would be absolutely false to say that he lobbied at any point,” Mr. Evans said.

As his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has gained traction in recent weeks, Mr. Gingrich has said he expects increased scrutiny of his business activities since leaving Congress in 1999. Those activities, which primarily involve the Center for Health Transformation and his original consulting firm, the Gingrich Group, have made him wealthy. The consultancy and center earned a combined $55 million over the last 10 years, according to a Gingrich Group representative.

From the moment he entered private life, Mr. Gingrich seemed determined to avoid being tagged as a lobbyist, which can be a kiss of death for anyone contemplating a presidential run. An early consulting contract, with a plastics company in 2001, contained language that would become standard: He “does not provide lobbying services of any kind.”

“He made it very clear to us that he does not lobby, but that he could direct us to the right places in Washington and elsewhere,” said Paul Branagan, who was president of Millennium Plastics when it hired Mr. Gingrich for $7,500 a month plus stock options.

As his policy interests increasingly focused on health care, Mr. Gingrich created the center, which he portrays as a think tank promoting innovative ways to improve health care delivery and save money. Companies and trade groups pay annual fees ranging from $20,000 to $200,000, with higher-paying members gaining more direct access to Mr. Gingrich.

Many of the ideas he has pushed involve the increased use of information technology, and companies specializing in that are well represented on the center’s roster. They also figured prominently in an early center initiative, teaming up in 2003 with the conservative Georgia Public Policy Foundation to promote changes in health care in Mr. Gingrich’s home state.

At his discussion with Georgia House Republicans in 2004, Mr. Gingrich gave examples of companies whose services could “both improve health and start saving money,” according to the center’s summary of his presentation. His talk included a handout listing mostly members of the center, their contact information and a description of their services.

Kelly McCutchen, the policy foundation’s president, said that Mr. Gingrich was good at convincing state lawmakers of the merits of modernizing health care, and that citing cutting-edge companies was effective.

“He does cite examples in his presentations,” Mr. McCutchen said. “But everybody cites examples. Is there a quid pro quo? Can you prove that a company is paying someone to lobby a position, or are they just supporting them because they like the educational work they’re doing? I’ll let others decide that.”

In Washington, Mr. Gingrich’s push for electronic health records illustrated how his own policy advocacy and his ties to former Congressional colleagues made him a sought-out consultant for companies like Astra Zeneca and Siemens. Mr. Gingrich hailed HealthTrio, one of the center’s “founding charter members,” during a hearing held in 2003 by Senator Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho. Telling the senator that HealthTrio’s chief executive had helped design the electronic records program in the United Kingdom, Mr. Gingrich said the company “estimates we could have an electronic health record for every American for about 10 cents per month, per person.”

The center later arranged for HealthTrio and I.B.M. to meet with senior federal health officials and congressional leaders “to review the U.K. approach and how it might be applied in the U.S.,” according to center records.

Some of the ideas promoted by the center found their way into the electronic health records legislation proposed by Mr. Kennedy, which was prepared with input from Mr. Gingrich. Mr. Kennedy said that he had known Mr. Gingrich from their days in the House, and that they had found a common interest in the issue.

“We worked together because it usually got people’s attention,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. “When there was a Kennedy and a Gingrich, it got people to think, ‘Hey, if this is above partisanship, let me take another look at it.’ ”

A Congressional staff member involved in the legislation, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said Mr. Gingrich had frequently cited the work of companies he identified as “members” of his center. But the staff member said it was not initially clear to him that they were paying the former House speaker. “It was a year before I even realized that the Center for Health Transformation was even a for-profit company, because it didn’t sound like one,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on November 30, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Gingrich Gave Push to Clients, Not Just Ideas. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe